Aesthetics across Cultures

This book critically examines the "mutual illuminations" between literature, religion, architecture, films, performative arts, paintings, woodworks, memes and masks cutting across time and space. Architecture is a good example where the eventual success of a project depends on the harmony between physical sciences and aesthetics, design and planning, knowledge of building material, the local climate and awareness of cultural sensibilities. This volume affirms that aesthetics and arts are deeply linked through existential issues of who I am. The chapters in this volume present diverse discursive structures highlighting the in-between spaces between various art forms and mediums, such as:

• Architecture, literature and memory

• Kafka in SoHo; Kafka and Bernhard

• Kirchner’s woodcuts; pictorial and stage representations of E.T.A. Hoffmann

• Hesse’s fairy tales; translations of Pañcatantra

• Nietzsche, ritual arts and face masks; martyrdom in La chanson de Roland

• Goethe and Hafiz; Indian thought in Martin Buber

• Rhythms of the "Third" across cultures

• Dadaism and contemporary memes

This book examines these sublime linkages in a comparative and interdisciplinary way. Engaging and intersectional, this volume will appeal to students and scholars of arts and aesthetics, literature, philosophy, architecture, sociology, translation studies and readers who are interested in cultural, intertextual, intermedial and comparative studies.

Rosy Singh is professor of German literature in Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research interests include literature, arts, translation and semiotic studies. She has worked extensively on Kafka, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Peter Handke and in the South-Asian context on Shah Hussain and Manto. She is the author of Rilke, Kafka, Manto: The Semiotics of Love, Life and Death (2001), Tagore, Rilke, Gibran: A Comparative Study (2002), Autobiography: Fact and Fiction (ed.) (2009), Franz Kafka and Literary Criticism: ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘The Burrow’ (2010), and Essays on Contemporary German Literature (2017).